Seems very sensible. x.com/demishassabis/…
It's been interesting and puzzling to witness the problems with accuracy in UK economic statistics over the past few years. (See the links in the next tweet for more.) It seems that the Office for National Statistics, ONS, now struggles to effectively measure basic figures such as employment, trade, and inflation. This resulted in a quite scathing government report published last summer, where Robert Devereux, a former permanent secretary, concluded that "most of the well-publicised problems with core economic statistics are the consequence of ONS’s own performance." There's a lot of discussion about the travails facing the UK these days (including this big piece in The Atlantic a few weeks ago[1]), and the problems with the ONS feel like an unsettling microcosm of diffuse decline in broader institutional competence. Anyhow: at Stripe, we became curious about the UK's published entrepreneurship data. While we observe a boom in many parts of the world, official figures don't show a similar increase in the UK. In the latest Stripe Economics post, we dug into the data, and, as far as we can tell, the official figures are probably misleading. The good and the bad news (mostly good, I think!) is that the UK is almost certainly witnessing an unmeasured boom in entrepreneurship: t.co/R7oTZNmxc6 UK-specific issues aside, I suspect that this measurement question is illustrative of forthcoming econometric challenges. Keeping the world's macro indicators up-to-date in response to the faster-than-usual changes wrought by AI will be both increasingly difficult and increasingly important in the coming years. [1] t.co/OAnwRmpyON
On the ONS: • ft.com/content/fe043c… • ft.com/content/5fd0a7… • ft.com/content/5bd04b… • blog.ons.gov.uk/2026/06/19/lea… • bbc.com/news/articles/…
I've been enjoying Victoria Whitworth's new work, The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma. I've actually never seen the Book of Kells in person, somewhat to my embarrassment. I've been doing some reading about the origins of Christianity this year, however, and I figured I should know something about the most famous Irish manuscript. (Perhaps the most famous manuscript, full stop.) Reading the book, I was struck by how much the contents have suffered over the past ~1200 years (enduring everything from water damage to reckless malfeasance in attempted nineteenth century restoration), and I wondered whether AI could help give a sense for how the work might originally have appeared. I downloaded the Internet Archive's PDF and asked my friendly neighborhood agent to use gpt-image-2 to render each page the way it imagines it might have originally appeared. Remarkably, this all worked with a single prompt, with the agent spinning up 48 workers, since each page took a minute or two. (I'm sure that someone wiser than me could prompt the model better, ensuring somewhat more historical accuracy in color restoration and so forth. There is no gold leaf in the Book of Kells!) This part of the project went from conception to completion before I'd finished my morning coffee. I then wanted some easy way to view the results online, so I asked Stripe Projects (t.co/1tSgGbSLxM) to host the result on Vercel. That also worked in basically a single prompt: t.co/5ED9TM7lJB. I also figured that people might want an easy way to download the full PDF of updated images, but it's a large (~200MB) file, so I decided that I should charge $0.10 to cover bandwidth costs using @MPP. I asked my agent to set this up, and it basically worked smoothly, though I had to tell it what MPP is (I guess it's not yet in the pretrain) and also manually set up the Cloudflare account that actually hosts the PDF and configure the API key. (Vercel seemingly has a 100MB limit.) The purchases now show up in my Stripe account alongside all other activity. The site now has a ready-made agent prompt for anyone who wants to download the whole thing. I'm guessing that we'll see a lot more UIs like this in the future. I remain pretty intrigued by the intersection of agents, micropayments, and stablecoins. I don't know much about managing crypto wallets from the CLI, but now AI can do that for me, while Stripe seamlessly handles turning it all back into fiat. So what is the moral of the story? • Whitworth's book is very good, and you should buy it. • The Internet Archive continues to be wonderful and a civilizational treasure. • While there are rough edges, setting up third-party services via the CLI now basically works. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered with any of this if I couldn't have outsourced almost all of the work to AI. • The image models have gotten very good. • There will probably continue to be all kinds of interesting applications of AI to history. (The Vesuvius Challenge of course being a shining pioneer.) • These days, I often find myself building single-use sites for things I'm learning or for books I'm reading. I think this is a cool new category of software.
Links post from @RichardHanania, noting: "A very high portion of the links comes from Works in Progress, which I think has become in essence the most must-read thing on the internet." richardhanania.com/p/indigenous-a…
Delighted to partner with Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Google, and many others, to introduce Open Standard, a new stablecoin designed for scale: joinopenstandard.com.
New from Stripe Economics: The Age of the Solopreneur stripeeconomics.com/p/the-age-of-t…
New project: interceptfund.com. More: interceptfund.substack.com/p/ending-respi….
I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches.
Very early experiment but I think this will be cool. stripe.directory.
A very kind endorsement of @WorksInProgMag from the peerless and inspiring @kevin2kelly. recomendo.com/p/works-in-pro… You can (and should!) subscribe over at worksinprogress.co/print.
I just visited Paris. The city seemed to be in particularly radiant shape this time. • It got me thinking about how many of the nicest built environments in the world standardize materials rather than form. Jerusalem's stone regulation makes it much prettier than Tel Aviv. Similarly, rules in the Charleston, the Cotswolds, and Sea Ranch leave a lot of flexibility in shape, but tightly restrict materials in a way that yields cohesion. In Paris's case, there are of course also some rules around form, but the consistency of the limestone (and zinc) is very pleasant. • I hadn’t before internalized that central Paris is unique for the fraction of its building stock that is traditional. There are of course some modern buildings, such as Centre Pompidou and the new facade at La Samaritaine, but they are rare and typically dramatic. Most pleasant old cities (such as London) contain more of a mixture. • Relatedly, is Haussmannian Paris the finest example of the central planning that Scott decries? "By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation." And is the late 19th century the last time you could have done this well, immediately before the corruptions of modernism? I guess Chicago was later, but Paris certainly comes close. • From a book I picked up: In a letter of 1886 to the Ministry of Public Works, Charles Garnier, architect of the neo-Baroque Paris Opéra, wrote, “The Metropolitan Railroad, in the eyes of most Parisians, will only be excused if it rejects absolutely all industrial character so as to be completely a work of art. Paris must not be made into a factory, it must stay a museum.” Are there elites anywhere in the world today who would reject something in the physical world unless it was a work of art? One artist recently commented to me that late 19th century France had the most educated visual culture among its elites in human history. This observation struck me a few times as I traveled around. • I am curious what those who defend modern architecture say about central Paris. Do they think that one could in principle have a place built of modern architecture that people would find as attractive and that would bring joy to so many? Do they think that such a place exists in actuality today? If not, why not? Or is the goal of having somewhere pretty and attractive in their eyes itself ignoble and saccharine? To me Paris feels like a challenge of the whole project. • Walking past the Louvre at night, I was struck by its austerity and severity. It made me reflect on how Parisians in 1700 might have felt as they took it in, and the subjugation that has been associated with social structures of prior eras. (Maybe this is on my mind partly as a result of reading Charles Taylor.) It made me wonder if I should be slightly more sympathetic to modernism for embodying a sense of individual freedom and joy. The Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Grand Palais was quite a contrast. • Perhaps heretical, but Notre Dame is just not especially impressive as a cathedral, especially inside, though the restoration seems to have been excellently done, and is a terrific achievement. Overall, Lincoln cathedral (say) is much more attractive in my view. Maybe I need to read Hugo to appreciate it better. (Hugo apparently was responsible for much of the resurgence of interest in Gothic architecture. A good example, I guess, of art driving life.) • The Renoir exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay was interesting for its emphasis on egalitarian and open relations between men and women, not something observed everywhere in the world at the time. "At the same time delicate and modest – neither moralising nor Dionysian." I thought of @_alice_evans and her work. • There are now so many bikes in Paris. It means you have to pay very active attention as a pedestrian, but is overall a big improvement. Rue de Rivoli is now dominated by the pleasant whirr of bicycles. I mostly got around this way. • The Musée Quai Branly is very interesting – it’s the best tour of the world in a single compressed space that I know of. Most of the works are not impressive as such, but the concentrated breadth is great. The Ethiopian illustrated Gospels were very charming. • Maybe my imagination, but there seemed to me to be a third fewer brasseries than on prior trips. Overall, the food was good, but not better than what you get at good restaurants in the US. The median in Paris is definitely still better, though. • The Matisse exhibition at the Grand Palais was pleasant. It mostly reminded me of the observation that it is difficult to rank artists but easy to rank the work of a given artist. The Blue Nudes and The Sheaf are just very obviously among Matisse’s best work. • The Michelangelo x Rodin exhibition at the Louvre was excellent, most of all for making clear how direct the artistic lineage is. Given the 300 year interlude, we should probably be more optimistic about the prospects for revival of the best of the visual arts. I hadn't before realized that Michelangelo's career spanned 74 years. It’s easy to focus on youth and prodigious genius, but maybe enduring genius should be more central. May we all aim to be useful and productive for a large majority of a century! In this vein, David Hockney, RIP, also just cleared the 70 year career mark. • The Louvre is quite hot; far hotter than an American museum would be. Presumably because of EU/French air conditioning laws? (26 degree regulatory minima, supposedly.) • Overall, central Paris feels like it's in very good shape. Things are generally quite clean and well-maintained. Not too much graffiti (though some buildings, such as the Louvre, are very overdue for power washing.) Nowhere felt unsafe. (Given that it’s been ruled continuously by socialists since 2001, one wonders why it has fared better than many coastal cities in America. The LLMs claim that it's because much of the funding is central and because the police report centrally, not to the mayor.) Overall, is central Paris the greatest single artistic achievement in the world? That is what I came away wondering. Pictured: Ethiopian prayer scroll; Iranian qalamkari; Renoir; af Klint.
Being comically maladapted to sunny climes, I have in endless and often unsuccessful pursuit of self-defense experimented with a sprawling battery of different sunscreens. This one is by far the best I’ve found: t.co/JpGfY3L5sY. (You need to illicitly procure the non-US version; the FDA valiantly shields us from its benefits due to their restrictive and seldom-updated set of permissible sunscreen ingredients.)
The @Tempo mainnet launched 93 days ago. Quick summary of the current state: • Run rate payment volume is around $3 billion. There's a long way to go, but it's cool to see real usage already emerging. (It took Stripe a lot longer than 93 days to get to $3 billion.) • As a blockchain, we obviously don't know about all the different use-cases. (Please tell us if you're doing something cool with Tempo!) Larger companies using Tempo include @Deel, which is using Tempo to pay out to their vast network of contractors, and @Meta, which is using it via @Link for global payouts. There are a bunch of other large companies working on Tempo integrations that'll be announced soon. • Internally, developing on Tempo has been fun, and Tempo is now Stripe's default blockchain for new features. • On the AI side of things, there appear to be around 1,000 active services selling to agents via the Machine Payments Protocol (@mpp). There's a useful directory of available services at t.co/fAZ5iA5nZc. 570 unique agents, for example, seem to have purchased from @ExaAILabs, and 332 from @openweather. I don't know how long it'll take for this use-case to become big, but it seems all-but inevitable that it will within a few years. • Today, @Stripe, @Visa, and @StanChart are running Tempo validators. Validation will become more decentralized over time. • The Tempo team is building a lot of new protocol functionality. For example, privacy zones, receive policies, and virtual addresses. (Details for all on the Tempo blog: t.co/jE7ltNIaj2.) In general, our belief is that there's a lot of functionality to be built at the blockchain level to make higher-level applications easy and performant. The original thesis behind Tempo was that both AI and stablecoins would stretch blockchains in new ways, with need for privacy, fees denominated/payable in stablecoins, batch transactions, microtransactions, faster confirmations, and so forth. Overall, this still seems like the right set of bets, and the agentic stuff is happening somewhat faster than I was expecting. "1M stablecoin TPS, with the vast majority from agents" still seems like the right north star.
Very much enjoyed this piece in the latest @WorksInProgMag about how Alberta became a rat-free sanctuary and the only significant human-inhabited place on earth that is free of them. Excellent "you can just do things" energy. "William Lobay, a crop protection supervisor at the Alberta Department of Agriculture, came up with the idea of a buffer zone focused on the area of prairie and parkland that was most vulnerable to penetration. In late 1950, Albertan officials approved his Rat Control Zone, a roughly 600-by-29-kilometer strip along the part of its eastern border with Saskatchewan. In the zone, William Lobay and his colleagues surveyed cargo and vehicles that entered the province, and inspected vulnerable sites like farms, grain elevators, feed stacks, barns, sheds, and abandoned buildings, where food and shelter made rat establishment most likely." t.co/t8sGM5BTJI
Congratulations to @eoghan, @destraynor, and the whole Fin team! x.com/eoghan/status/…
Delighted to partner with @LloydsBank to bring Stripe’s capabilities to millions of new businesses. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
I want some kind of LLM workflow tool. • Ability to manage a set of input files (Markdown or similar), plus other general-purpose context. • With real-time collaboration. (And maybe some concept of snapshots or VCS integration.) • And the ability to create/manage a inference
Sad to hear that Ada's Technical Books in Seattle is closing this week -- it's a wonderful bookstore. I always found something obscure but interesting when I visited. adasbooks.com
Every time I fly to New York, I'm struck by how many trees there are in the densely-populated areas around the city. (Coming from the West Coast, one arrives over the Garden State, and the suitability of the sobriquet is quite apparent from the air.) It feels like this degree of
I’ve been struck by this phenomenon in much of the discussion around Hormuz. Who exactly should one listen to for systems as complex and reflexive as energy? (Evidently not IEA.) Is it even possible to make meaningful predictions for out-of-distribution shocks like strait closure x.com/lugaricano/sta…
Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants. Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on
Interesting @DouthatNYT on @nanransohoff's essay, @WillManidis's pieces, and (in passing) the call for New Aesthetics: nytimes.com/2026/05/23/opi….
Cool release from @p0. I think this use-case (agents paying content creators for access via @mpp) will be very big. Micropayment walls haven't worked (as Clay Shirky anticipated many years ago) because of human cognitive overhead, but agents can make arbitrarily granular x.com/p0/status/2056…
Owing to a variety of historical reasons (including, but not only, protectionist lobbying), the U.S. is the only G7 country where regulated payments companies can’t directly access government-run settlement rails. Yesterday's EO from the White House calls for that to change.
